Air-Gapped Security Architecture

Every component in your environment, nothing sent to xpander, and entitlement by a signed license.

Everything runs in your cluster: xpander Chat, sign-in, the API, the Agent Controller, the execution tier, the AI Gateway, the data tier and license checks. It installs from your own registry mirror with a signed license file. There is no connection to xpander Cloud: no heartbeats, no metadata sync, no telemetry. The install guide is Air-gapped deployment.

Architecture

Air-gapped deployment. Everything (UI, sign-in, API, Agent Controller, the execution tier, AI Gateway, data tier, license verification) runs in your network. No xpander Cloud, no PrivateLink, no deployment-manager sync.

Part	What it is
Users	Reach xpander over your own network: internal DNS, VPN or a private load balancer. See Domains, Ingress & DNS.
Data tier	In-cluster PostgreSQL, Redis (queues, cache, knowledge-base vectors) and MongoDB, or your own Postgres and Redis. See Data tier options.
Model calls	Through the in-cluster LLM Gateway, always on, holding the provider keys and recording every call. A call to a provider with no key is refused with a message that names it. The gateway calls your endpoint: in-network vLLM, Ollama or NVIDIA NIM, Amazon Bedrock over a PrivateLink VPC endpoint to AWS (not xpander), or a hosted provider if your policy allows. See Local LLM inference.
Skill calls	Only the systems you connect, such as private Salesforce, internal GitLab or self-managed Jira. Egress is your policy.

What leaves the environment

Nothing goes to xpander Cloud. Agent configurations, the skills catalog, threads, memory, task results, knowledge bases (including embeddings), credentials and audit logs all stay in your cluster.

Every connection that leaves the perimeter is optional. With OpenCode and an open-weight model served in-network, nothing leaves.

When	Connection	Your choice
Run time	Your model endpoint: in-network (vLLM, Ollama, NIM), Amazon Bedrock over VPC endpoints for bedrock-runtime, sts and eks-auth, or a hosted provider	Set in global.llm.defaults. A sealed install refuses any leg that would dial a public host without an endpoint you named.
Run time	Skills	Only the systems you connect
Run time	Outbound mail for sign-in codes and agent replies (SMTP or SES)	With global.smtp.* unset, codes are read from the cluster
Run time	S3 for blob storage	In-cluster storage is the default
Run time	NTP	Your cluster’s time source
Install and upgrade	Your registry mirror, the chart source, the release manifest	Mirror on a connected machine or use the two-hop archive flow
Never	xpander cloud: heartbeats, catalog sync, telemetry, license checks	No phone-home

Hosts and ports: What Talks to What.

Entitlement and sign-in

The license is a signed Ed25519 file, checked by the installer, by the chart’s preflight hook, and by the in-cluster deployment manager at boot, which refuses to start on a bad signature. Renewal is a Secret update plus helm upgrade (The License).

Sign-in is local: a bootstrap admin password, email OTP (works without SMTP, with codes read from the cluster), or SSO with your own OIDC provider. See Signing In.

Operations stay yours

• Observability: your Prometheus scrapes xpander’s /metrics endpoints, and kubectl logs feeds your log stack (Loki, ELK, Splunk).
• Updates are explicit. Nothing auto-updates. Mirror the new release, then upgrade. Security advisories name the patched chart version.
• Skills target your systems. Anything that needs a public service is not offered under the sealed posture.

Air-Gapped or Hybrid?

	Air-Gapped	Hybrid
Choose it when	Policy forbids outbound traffic, networks are classified or no-egress, or data sovereignty rules out hosted LLMs	You need data residency and audit, not zero egress
Tradeoff	You run local models and mirror releases yourself	Lighter to operate, same data-plane isolation
Hosted LLMs	Only if your policy allows	Reachable, including over PrivateLink

If your workload can call hosted LLMs over a private network, choose Hybrid. Otherwise, Air-Gapped.

Next steps

Install an air-gapped deployment

The complete guide

Review the runtime controls

Permissions, credentials, safety

Compare with Hybrid

What leaves your VPC

Request compliance documents

SOC 2, GDPR